investigative journalism

Hank Price: “With the unfortunate demise of print, leading television groups are making an even stronger commitment to local investigations. They are doing this with a full understanding of the financial costs. Why? Because they are in the journalism business. That means putting the well-being of the communities they serve first, no matter the cost or political pressure.”

This has been the autumn of discontent for investigative TV journalists. “I would say that you don’t go to broadcast television to see investigative reporting these days,” said Lowell Bergman, a veteran investigative news producer and emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. “There’s much less of it because it’s a bigger hassle than other kinds of reporting. And network television has always been concerned not just with ratings but with profits.”

Gretchen Morgenson, the veteran investigative reporter who has won multiple journalism prizes for her coverage of Wall Street, is joining the investigative unit of NBC News.

It looks like NBC Boston’s (WBTS) emphasis on investigative journalism has paid dividends in Washington. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has reached out to Tesla with concerns about safety flaws in Tesla’s autopilot system, citing the station’s investigation.

Airing Sunday mornings, the investigative news program hosted by Sharyl Attkisson reaches nearly 700,000 households weekly.

An experimental Facebook Watch show reports on journalism while trying to reinvent it.

KUSA Denver Investigative Reporter Chris Vanderveen says when people spot him in public they call him “the medical bill guy” because he has done so many stories about the outrageous bills that hospitals send to patients. The Tegna-owned NBC affiliate has produced 36 in-depth stories and two hours of primetime specials about medical billing and is not letting up.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to know that in this age of streaming and on-demand viewing, linear TV notions of time and space don’t apply. But it did take a Breland — Sandy Breland, group vice president at Raycom Media — to apply that new reality to investigative reporting.